30/12/2012

Moreton Hall: once a stately home owned by a
Cambridge history professor, now a private school. Day and boarding,
‘preparatory and pre-preparatory’. Pre-preparatory?

According
To Locals (1) From 1940s to 1960s the whole area around Moreton Hall,
previously farmland, was a military airfield abandoned after the war. Children
played unsupervised among the munitions.

According
To Locals (2) In the 1950s Ford wanted to build a car plant on the site. The
council refused, said high wages would damage other local industries. Moreton
Hall, almost-Dagenham, then became a residential development.

Leave Symonds Road at right angle
bend – past the layby where 6 years ago I parked every morning for a 3 week
temporary agency admin job at a bank in the town centre - into Shakers Lane (no vehicular access)

No
evidence of Shaker worship, architecture or furniture in Shakers Lane; only the
background drumming of traffic on the concrete runway of the bypass gouged
into the landscape 100 metres away.

Continue
straight ahead, past left turn leading to footbridge over dual carriageway
towards the Abbey Gardens / town centre. Ignore the call of the A14 container
lorry-retail park continuum, in many ways the successor to the Abbey itself; a once all-powerful institution ransacked by
rioting townspeople and dismantled for scrap.

Further
down Shakers Lane: sequestered elderly care home; SCOPE ‘Inclusion’ Unit; one
or two houses; B&B.

End of Shakers Lane, reformatted junction with
Hollow Road and Barton Road. A mini-roundabout is overlooked by a distinctive relic of a 14th century window, moved from a hospital in another part of the town to its current location in
the late 1700s, forming part of another hospital building which later became a private house. For some time, seemingly since at least 1900, it has stood alone, its second home also a ruin.

North up Hollow Road, towards the sugar factory. By bridge over railway line: ‘Adult Learning Centre’
recently renamed ‘Community Hub’. Outline of old lettering still visible on brickwork behind new sign. Biopolitical palimpsest.

The metallic mass of the sugar factory, its silos
sighing, chimneys puffing out white smoke. An actual real-life factory, not a CGI
heritage simulation. Have to resist the urge to walk up to the barrier and ask the
security guard if I might wander in and have a look
around.

Occasional lumps of sugar beet, thrown off
by over-enthusiastic delivery lorries, lie like dead seed pods on the pavement
outside the houses opposite the factory. Having started their lives in a remote
field somewhere on the planet’s surface, at every moment being guided by nature
and human intervention toward their final transcendent crystallisation, these
poor specimens got to within a calorie of fulfilment only to end up, by the
whim of the sucrose Gods, stranded here on the hard shoulder outside the gates
of Silver Spoon. Imagine residents tired of tripping over these unwanted gifts
every day upon their arrival home, picking up the dirty beets and hurling the damned things back at the
trucks as they rumble past.

Just past the factory, the pavement
dissolves into generic automotive (de)territory. All that is solid melts into non-place
signage. Peripheral zone of industrial units and DIY outlets. Hot tubs, ‘Mole
Country Stores’.